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Blog post 2

Listening to Cori Antonini past Wednesday night was a really on task learning experience for me. Because the way he talked about rubrics and linked it to 21st century learners felt very important to me. And I totally agree with him on to bring the end goal first to the learner (bringing to learner what they can achieve and how they can achieve in first class). Although there were lot of cool things in the Saskatchewan learning project but one thing that touched me was use of built in strategies for assessment, instruction and differentiation. Because, for me as a beginning teacher I think that if we create rubrics using these built ins then they can become a very strong tool that will help and support classroom instruction which in turn benefit students learning. I did a research on my part find some books on creating rubrics and found an interesting one “How to Create and Use Rubrics for Formative Assessment and Grading” by Susan M. Brookhart. And in the book she identifies two essential components of effective rubrics: (1) criteria that relate to the learning (not the “tasks”) that students are being asked to demonstrate and (2) clear descriptions of performance across a continuum of quality. Now, when we were creating rubric in the class all groups were feeling that we need to create more criteria in our rubrics and have to mention clear description of performance. And this links to the situation that if we created a rubric that the students are having difficulty in understanding then the end result will be unfruitful because how can we expect that rubric to align instruction and assessment. Use of clear description and proper criteria’s will help students in understanding the rubric and thus making them confident to engage in using the rubric.

But we have to be careful because too much information will lead student thinking towards confusion so we have to keep the organization of the rubric moderate and comprehensible. Picking right amount of columns and there names and the information across the columns have to organized and reflective for students reading and learning. As we talked about flow from one column to next when discussing meeting and established column, student should be able to see this flow in the rubric.

On the other hand, I was browsing about rubrics and stumbled on an other rubric creating tool called “iRubric”. And this tool is quite similar to the one Cori talked about. There are many tools available for creating rubric but as Andrew Miller mentioned in his blog “rubrics are everywhere and with so many competing purposes, it only makes sense that rubrics remain a beast to create and use”.

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One comment

Great post Abdul! When I was in high school, I was rarely given rubrics so I really didn’t know what I was being marked on. I was given outlines of what should be in my assignments; however, rubrics weren’t really implemented throughout my schooling. I agree that rubrics give students the chance to see and visualize how they are going to be marked. I just have a couple questions about rubrics. (1) Would you only use rubrics on assignments that you are taking in for marks, or would you use them for all assignments? and (2) Do you think students will solely focus on what is in the rubric, and will start to become less creative in their work?
I have a couple ideas as to how I would answer those questions, but I’m just wondering what your ideas are. To answer my first question, when I think of rubrics, I think of grades/marks. So when it would come to giving rubrics, I think I would only give them when I am going to be collecting an assignment (whether it is for marks or not). To answer my second question, I think that rubrics do take away the creative side of assignments; however, if you give the students three options, such as a poster, a video report, or a paper, and have a rubric associated to each one of those, then students would be able to be more creative. They would still focus on what is in the rubric; however, they will be able to decide how they want to present their assignment. I still have a hard time figuring out how to use rubrics in a mathematics classroom, but I do see the benefits of rubrics overall. Cori Antonini’s presentation was very informative; however, I wish all of the renewed high school mathematics curricula were on the rubric database. It includes Workplace & Apprenticeship and Pre-Calculus, but it doesn’t include Foundations of Mathematics. In our textbook for EMTH 350, there is an entire chapter on rubrics, and I think after we read that chapter we will become more informed on how to create rubrics and the benefits of them.